National Theatre Wales
Elin Williams
Dylan Thomas’ iconic play Under Milk Wood boasts a host of colourful characters. From the blind sea Captain Cat to the loveable Polly Garter washing the steps of the welfare hall, the play is a play for voices; a play for characters. Thomas, born in Swansea, thirst like a dredger, moved to Laugharne with his wife Caitlin in 1938. It was here he most likely got the inspiration for those characters, although the setting was allegedly inspired by New Quay in Ceredigion. This year for the poet’s 100th birthday, Dylan is everywhere and National Theatre Wales’s Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been hailed a significant poetic voice by TS Eliot. By 39 he was dead, hastened to his grave by a lethal combination of alcohol, pneumonia and New York doctors.The roaring boy who lived hard and died young has been iconised on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and gave his name to a scrawny-voiced crooner from Minnesota (although this is sometimes disputed by Read more ...
Gary Raymond
Henry James said, “Realism is what in some shape or form we might encounter, whereas Romanticism is something we will never encounter.” The 19th-century Realists believed that “ordinary people” were “fit to be endowed” with the greatness of imaginative writing. Rachel Trezise’s first stage play, Tonypandemonium, an attempt at kitchen sink par excellence, understands James’ definition; unfortunately it does not seem to understand the second part; that realism is different from mere replication, and that it must belong to artistry.Trezise’s play seems intent only on replicating. Indeed the Read more ...
Gary Raymond
Almost before the dust has settled on their globe-spanning collaboration with New National Theatre Tokyo, National Theatre Wales embarks on a very different, if no less ambitious, partnership with the mercurial synth pop duo Neon Neon. The sometime project of Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys and producer and solo artist Boom Bip, Neon Neon have written their second concept album (the first, Stainless Style, was a biography of John DeLorean); this is another life story, another sharp, warm, joyous record filled with snappy bass turns and raise-the-roof keyboard riffs. On this night, Read more ...
Dylan Moore
National Theatre Wales like the word “us”. It was there in Michael Sheen’s Passion of Port Talbot – its film adaptation was called The Gospel of Us – and it is here, prominently, in the multi-layered title of Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes’ latest site-specific offering. The team that brought Aeschylus’ The Persians to the Brecon Beacons military range have now commandeered a disused aircraft hangar a few miles outside Cardiff to stage an experimental version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, sprinkled with Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished version Coriolan. The German’s curtailed title allows the Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Adrian Burley MP would probably call In Water I’m Weightless “leftie multicultural crap”. I’d like to bestow similar praise. In common with Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony, director John McGrath’s exploration of issues facing disabled people is a bit of a mess, a bit of a tick-box exercise and thoroughly enjoyable.The play is a rallying cry for the civil rights of the disabled, and wears its politics somewhat heavily. But despite some meanderings in the middle, by the time we reach writer Kaite O’Reilly’s epic final monologue, a paean to the “gen of the genome”, “the glorious freak[s] Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Ever since the Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz documented the debauchery of South Wales nightlife in a series called Cardiff at Night, there has been a kind of perverse glamour in images of scantily clad girls and young women falling down drunk whilst roaming gangs of check-shirted “roiders” look on gormlessly. Being as Swansea’s nightlife is, as depicted here, even “scruttier” – to use the evocative local parlance (think “slut” meets “scrubber” and you’ve got it) – than that of the capital, an artistic documentation of Swansea at Night was inevitable at some point. The surprise is in the Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Looking at CCTV footage of a school hall in Cardiff through Adobe Flash Player in the corner of a webpage and listening to the attendant interference, bells, buzzes and bleeps might not sound like the cutting edge of theatre. But by the time National Theatre Wales’ tech wizard Tom Beardshaw closes the live stream of Tim Price’s electric new play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning with the school pupils and soldiers we have been watching taking their bow, this is exactly what the "audience" are convinced we have witnessed.NTW Director John E McGrath, having overseen one of the most radical Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner’s institute, and – most memorably – claimed the whole town of Port Talbot as their stage for Owen Sheer’s The Passion last Easter. Setting themselves the challenge of producing 12 productions in their first 12 months, this building-less company have somehow turned a modest (not to say meagre) £1 million a year subsidy into a living, risk-taking tradition of national theatre. Their latest play, Peter Gill’s Chekhov adaptation A Provincial Life, not only marks a rare visit for the Read more ...
Dylan Moore
There is a simple explanation to why Cardiff-born Peter Gill has never directed in his home city, despite the fact that many of his own plays are set in the Catholic, working-class Cardiff of his youth. “I’d never been asked,” states Gill matter-of-factly; “it’s just a trade; it’s not a magical world. You have to ask me to do things.”There is something bracing about the lack of sentimentality with which Gill addresses the question of homecoming. It fits with the setting of our conversation too: a big, airy rehearsal room at the newly-rebuilt Sherman Theatre in the heart of Cardiff’s student- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
Dylan Moore
As autumn turns to winter and we enter “the dark half of the year”, National Theatre Wales opens its second season with a 16-show tour of village halls around the Principality. This is a time when the portal between ordinary life and the spirit world is traditionally opened up but The Village Social, written and directed by Dafydd James and Ben Lewis, does not so much leave the door ajar as, for one night only, kick it down and allow the darkest imaginings of an entire community to run riot in this most innocuous of environments.In keeping with the admirable precedent NTW established during Read more ...